The First London Theatre 33 
weighed upon Shakespeare and his fellows. The ominous note 
struck that shuddered through their lives, and the sharp heel of 
tragedy trod loud across the boards of the Globe. Not less than 
the rest but more sensitively, perhaps, did Shakespeare feel it, and 
he recorded the common tragic sense that was upon them all in 
the very themes chosen for enactment. Prior to the Globe enter- 
prise, his plays had been on the sunnier side. Henry V, the first 
new play at the Globe, was the last clear note of untrammeled life 
for many years. Then came the treachery and misguided states- 
manship in Julius Caesar, the vanquishing of idealism in the play 
of Hamlet, and the whole series of tragic interruptions of noble 
aspirations in the plays that range down the years to those more 
placid days when, about 1608-9, doubt and discord and threatened 
disaster were safely weathered. The following documents, aside 
from the history they hold, show in this regard some of the mere 
business conditions that made Shakespeare possible, and some of 
the difficulties that wrought in him supreme achievement. 
The materials for a history of the Shakespearean theatre and 
drama grow apace. After the labors of Malone, Chalmers, Col- 
lier, and Halliwell-Phillips in their life-long searches for docu- 
mentary evidences, it was gradually thought that the end was 
reached. The field long lay almost fallow, until about ten years 
ago, when the present writer took it up, with the result that vast 
new sources have been opened that enrich dramatic and theatrical 
history. Today no department of research is looked to with larger 
expectations. By the encouragement of the better sort, in spite 
of annoyances from a narrow circle, the scholar’s dream of bring- 
ing all these materials into a complete corpus may be realized. I 
am glad to be the inspirer of scholarly research, and have given 
help freely to many worthy students, whose work I heartily wel- 
come. But my researches have unfortunately attracted also 
another sort, an envious few, who find out by one means or 
another what records I have examined or am having prepared for 
examination, and then proceed to “discover” a document here 
and there for hasty publication. Such but hinder scholarship, 
divide and confuse the public. It is easy for them to “leaf” 
33 
